Social Networks, Kinship, and Community in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Social Networks, Kinship, and Community in Eastern Europe How people in the past used and valued kinship in their daily lives is one of the most important and most elusive matters in contemporary social history. The largest issue is the character of community life and how that character changed in the temporally imprecise, yet unmistakable, transition from the traditional to the modern world. Intimately related to this central question are others surrounding the nature of family life and the relationship of family to the various ecologies, economic systems, demographic regimes, and cultures that dotted the historical landscape of Europe and the West. We propose that a social network approach not only serves to conceptualize kinship and community in new and productive ways, but also helps to reconcile two long-standing concerns in family history that have led historians to study kinship in competing ways, and which reflect the current division between family history and family demography. In support, we offer a case study of kinship in an Eastern European peasant estate in the midnineteenth century. Although we do not advance either a fullfledged model or a complete application of the social network approach, the network perspective that we apply adds to the understanding of European kinship and provides a guide for future work.

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